First Winter at the Homestead

Now that the holidays and the cookbook shoot have wound down, I’m able to properly sit down with my head on straight and give you a long-awaited update on the homestead. I intended to do it sooner, I just severely underestimated how much time the actual moving and unpacking would take. (Like wow. I was very ambitious and inaccurate in both my packing *and* unpacking estimations.) And then it was Thanksgiving, then Christmas, and then cookbook gig. Also there are still dozens of boxes in the basement and garage. But you know, I feel like it always takes awhile to really get settled in a new place, so I’m not in a rush. At this point I’m of the camp that it’s good to live in a space for a bit before unpacking everything, so you can get a feel for how you move through and use every room, and arrange furniture and all your bits and bobs accordingly.

I may have mentioned this in an earlier post, but we were finally able to sell our Portland home in late October, and had to move out by November 1st at 5 pm. And on November 1st at 5:05 pm, we were loading the last random bits of our things into my parents car (my and Jeremy’s cars were already full to the brim). We’d done the whole “movers + moving truck” thing earlier that week, but overestimated how much of the last little scraps from the garage we’d be able to fit in our car, so it was a last-minute hail Mary that my parents were able to drive over from the neighboring town and help us fit all that last random stuff. You never really know how much stuff you have until you have to pack it into boxes and haul it around. Yikes! Hopefully this is the last time we will move, pretty much ever.

And so we drove up our winding gravel driveway, unloaded the last boxes in the pouring rain, and collapsed on the bed. Even though it was a REALLY insane day, that first night sleeping in our bedroom at the homestead was the most settled and relaxed I’ve felt in so long. No more mortgage applications, no more house showings, no more decisions to make on homestead details. We DID it! We were here! Inside the home we’d been imagining and working towards for YEARS. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of anything than the fact that we were able to get this house built.

Which seems like a fitting time to thank the **truly amazing** people who helped make this home a reality:

• Our incredible builder Philip from Hainline Construction for finishing the house beautifully and on budget
• My friend + interior designer Sam Struck for the warm + welcoming interior design
• Our landscape designers Resilience Design for helping with all the exterior planning
• Our architect Dylan Lamar for designing such an energy efficient home
• The amazing women at Churchill mortgage, who were there with us from the construction loan to the final mortgage

So once we were all moved in, we started to work on little projects on the inside of the house. I knowwww. It’s brand new—what more could there possibly be to do?? Well, once you’re physically in a space, you start to envision little design or furniture things that might be nice in certain spots. With the build, I had a hard time envisioning what the spaces would feel like until they were actually done and I was standing in them. So now that we’re here, all those little ideas are sprouting and it’s been *really* fun to dive into some interior projects during the cold season 🙂

The first project we worked on was getting the guest suite in the basement finished up. We wanted to add some bead board moulding for a cozy feeling, and some window coverings for privacy, since we’re hoping to host short-term guests in the space. It has it’s own private exterior entrance, but we needed to make a gravel path that connected the entrance to the driveway. Unfortunately, all the soil around the house is potters’ clay, and since it’s the rainy season, it sticks to everything like glue. So you can’t really walk on it when it’s wet without it forming a several inch-thick mass of sticky mud on the bottom of your shoes, which made the gravel path a huge priority. It’s all done now, and we have a path that goes all the way around the outside of the house in a circle, so now all four of the exterior doors have a gravel path that makes them accessible. Jeremy did most of this, since I’m not strong enough to shovel and haul gravel. But we did invest in an electric wheelbarrow which made the moving of the gravel a LOT easier. And if you have any big landscaping projects you’re planning that involve rocks or sand, I’d highly recommend getting one. It definitely saved Jeremy’s back! And we had our landscape specialists come out with a controlled burn team (Jesse + Spark) to burn the very big slash pile that was in front of the house. We’ll be planting the vegetable garden and a native grass meadow where the pile was in the spring. There’s about 13 more of those piles around the homestead, so we’ll be disassembling some of them in the coming years since they’re a pretty big fire hazard in the dry season.

The second biggest project we’ve worked on this winter is getting my photo studio space set-up. I wanted to be able to dive back into work as soon as possible, so I started painting the room as soon as we moved in with some lovely blue bauwerk lime wash paint. If you’re unfamiliar with limewash, it’s basically a non-toxic water-based mineral paint that’s made from natural pigments, and is essentially what house paint was like a few hundred years ago. It was my first time using limewash paint and I absolutely looooooved it, so I’ll definitely be using it for more projects around the house. I’ll dive deeper into my through process and how I designed the photo studio in a dedicated blog post, but you can take a peek at how it came out above!

And we also dug out and filled in the pad for the sauna to rest on. We bought this exterior barrel sauna for our old house years ago, and we took it with us when we moved, but needed to disassemble it in order to do so. So the bits have been hanging out in the garage taking up a lot of space until a couple weeks ago when we bit into this project. Jeremy dug out a square pad in the clay and made a wood frame, and then we put gravel in it and tamped it down. Then we added sand and evened it out and tamped *that* down, then we added concrete pavers, spaced them out evenly, and poured sand between them. And tamped it down some more. And finally, it was ready for us to re-assemble the sauna (hurray!) Reassembling the sauna was a million times easier than making the pad for it to sit on, but at least it will have a dry stable place to sit on. And it looks amazing in that spot with the view through the little window. Plus it’s right by the guest suite so they’ll be able to access it easily. Next we’re planning to build a little privacy wall and roof over it so they have a place to take off their robe and hop in.

Lastly, we had our first snow here just a week ago! I really really love snow. I love how bright it is, how it makes everything look clean, how it absorbs noise and makes everything so quiet, the way it crunches under your feet when you step on it, how it looks like a giant dusted a bunch of powdered sugar over the landscape…it’s just the best. (It also helps that I’d stockpiled enough food that we didn’t need to worry about driving until it melted a bit. And it’s a rarity here, so we don’t have to deal with it for weeks on end like the midwest). One thing that I didn’t think about until after it snowed was how easy it is to see the animals against the snow, too, and see where they’ve walked via their footprints. We’ve been holed up this past week with our binoculars watching deer, hawks, and bald eagles and it’s been so mesmerizing! (I need to get a longer telephoto lens so I can photograph them better from inside the house haha.)

Since moving in, we’ve kept one pair of binoculars upstairs and one pair downstairs so that we can watch watch the animals in vivid detail without scaring or disturbing them. They’re just soooo beautiful, and seeing them really makes you appreciate the beauty and complexity of nature (and life in general, for that matter). We haven’t seen a bear yet, but we did see a black bear last year and then again a couple years before that, so they definitely live in the area. And not to brag or whatever, but I’ve gotten prettttty good at identifying animal droppings. I found bear scat by the spring, bobcat scat on the driveway, and coyote scat on the driveway as well! Plus lots of deer droppings (of course). Because of all the predators around, and how small our dogs are, we ended up getting them these coyote vests that help deter predators. And of course we are ALWAYS with them when they’re outside (no more letting them out in the yard on their own to go potty). It’s been a wonderful surprise seeing how much happier they are out here, too. Sequoia, our oldest dog at 13/14 (she’s a shelter pup so we’re not 100% certain of her age), has been SO much more active and playful since we moved here. Like, every *single* day she plays, which she didn’t use to at our old place. And they both love the walks so much, and the fact that they’re off leash and can run as fast as they want (plus all the weird animal smells light up their little brains like crazy, I’m sure!)

Our next big project is getting the deer fence up next month for the future vegetable garden, and then we’ll be making all the raised beds after that and hopefully be ready to transplant in late April. I’ll share more about the garden as we dig into that project, too. It’s going to be pretty wild getting it all set up from scratch, but I am SOOOO excited for it! There’s nothing quite like starting from a clean slate. And I am planning to share posts about each of the rooms in the house as we finish moving into them and getting everything in place (I know there wasn’t a ton of interior pictures in this post, but I hope you enjoyed the outside wintery ones!)

Well that’s all for now, dear reader. Thank you for reading through my ramblings + following along on my journey, it means a lot. ‘Till next time my friend!